Is it possible to monitor and evaluate effectively efforts to influence policy? This paper provides an overview of approaches to the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of policy influencing activities. It suggests that while M&E in this field is challenging, information can be generated that can be used to improve programmes and provide accountability for funds. The key is for policy influencing teams to recognise the value of M&E to their work and to incorporate it into their practices from the beginning of a project or programme.
Influencing policy is a central part of much international development work. Donor agencies, civil society organisations and researchers all need to engage with policymakers if their work is to have wider public value. However, policy change is a highly complex process shaped by a multitude of interacting forces and actors. The achievement specific, hoped-for change is rare, and work that does influence policy is often not replicated.
M&E is highly challenging in these contexts. The process of policymaking will never be simple enough to be amenable to the statistical methods required to prove precisely the ‘impact’ of a particular intervention. Nevertheless, many M&E approaches involve tools that do not require high levels of technical skill to use and that generate useful information.
The use of M&E tools varies according to whether influence is to be achieved through evidence and advice, public campaigns and advocacy, or lobbying approaches. Tools used for the different approaches include the following:
- Evidence and advice: Various methods evaluate outputs, uptake and use based on a ‘causal chain’ theory of change (ToC) about how research and evidence influences policy. Research reports, policy briefs and websites can be monitored for outputs showing the influence of evidence and advice. User surveys, logs and new areas for citation analysis can show uptake and use of advice.
- Public campaigns and advocacy: Media tracking can assess media attention. Exposure and framing analyses can generate information about the link between media coverage and public attitudes. Exposure analysis involves measuring target audience exposure to a campaign and using interviews and surveys to study influence. Framing analysis involves comparing how issues are presented in a given media to a campaign’s messages and language, and tracking change in framing over time.
- Lobbying approaches: It is important to keep systematic track of key actors, (their interests, ideologies, capacities, alignment with programme goals, and relationships with other players, and how all of these change). Tracking people and relationships and the project’s interactions with them, recording observations from meetings and negotiations, interviewing key informants, and in-depth analysis can help to measure policy processes, actors, and relationships.
Collecting information, monitoring target audiences, and making judgements about levels of influence are time-consuming activities. It is therefore important to ensure that M&E systems collect information that has multiple uses – for both decision-making and reporting, for example. Additional recommendations are to:
- Make sure that collected information is integrated with knowledge produced during the planning stage of a project.
- Develop a theory of change as early as possible in the planning stage of an influencing project.
- Allow the ToC to set the overall framework for M&E, giving teams a way to categorise and make sense of available information throughout the project.
- Use M&E tools to collect relevant data opportunistically or at periodic intervals throughout policy influencing work.
- Select and integrate M&E tools into programme management from the outset, so that they can be used for decision-making throughout the programme, and become a useful resource after completion.
